Hi,
Many of the man page URLs link into an access-restricted walled
garden. E.g. all openvpn.net links go to a Cloudflare site that is not
open to all people. It’s an injustice for a Debian man page to refer
users to exclusive resources that may exclude them. This is perhaps
something that should be fixed in the Debian version as the upstream
project has no duty to the users. Debian has a quality standard as
well as a social contract and users to give equitable treatment
to. Therefore IMO the Debian project should remove the
access-restricted links from the man page and ideally replace them
with openly accessible links. The most convenient way to do that would
be to find mirrored versions of the pages in the Wayback Machine.
This one-liner would perhaps do the job well enough:
sed -e
'/http.*.openvpn.net/s@https://\([[:alnum:].]*openvpn.net\)@https://web.archive.org/web/\1@'
ietf.org has the same problem.
For this, while I share your concerns about the unmindful use of
Cloudflare reverse proxy for basically everything I don't agree to call
this a "walled garden". Certainly not enough to call the mentioning of
an URL that just _now_ happens to be "protected" by Cloudflare a policy
violation (or social contract violation) and alter the URLs to
web.archive.org, which to my experience is broken quite often, dog-slow
and not necessarily up-to-date. I think this would be more of a disservice.
Most of the interesting content should be in the manpage and in
/usr/share/doc/packages/openvpn anyway.
If you have concerns about the use of Cloudflare, please raise this
upstream. I know there are some devs sensitive to these concerns listening.
Bernhard
